When Big Brands Discover Social Media Marketing

Has anyone in your company asked you this question lately, or ever? Chances are, if you haven’t heard this question from a VP yet, you will soon। It’s what everyone is trying to figure out – not if we should be using social media, but how we should be using it. In this column, I’m going to look at a few ways that Yahoo! and others are using social media and how it’s evolving from a big-brand perspective.

See the related video from Neil Patel:
How to Build a $10M/Year Personal Brand (In Just 30 Days)

But first, a bit of perspective

Why do SEOs typically end up being the ones in their respective companies responsible for social media? On the surface, the two activities have little in common। SEO can be very technical, both in strategy and in practice. At the same time, social media looks a lot more like a public relations campaign.

But just to reset, when sites like Facebook, X, even Digg started to become popular, SEOs could readily see the potential for promoting their sites। Social media in the beginning was a double-whammy: not only could SEOs get bloggers and other authorities to link to their sites, providing link relevance, but they also got the incremental traffic coming from users following those links.

The link-building aspect has since been downplayed with the advent of nofollow tags, but the traffic source is very real and powerful if you can get links placed in the right spots.

Now that social media is becoming increasingly mainstream, like SEO, how can a big brand maximize its use of social media? As well, who in the organization should own social media marketing? When I look around at how we and other big brands use social media, it’s clear that social media’s role has yet to be fully defined. Let’s look at a few examples, and we’ll see.

Survey the landscape

Try this if you haven’t already: go to Facebook and search for your favorite big brand, whether it’s online or offline.। Where is the company’s official Facebook page? The fan page? Specific product pages? Hard to tell. This is one of the challenges with the social media landscape. As a brand loyalist, do I really want to sift through all those entries to find the group that speaks to me? Try the same thing on X – these spaces are already so crowded it’s hard to find the signal through all the noise.

Suppose these networks are going to be viable for commercial use, and one could argue that they will have to be in order to survive. In that case, social networks will need to find a way to stratify the landscape, drawing lines between commercial and non-commercial content, without alienating their user base. But enough of that; let’s look at some of the ways big brands are trying to use social media to their advantage.

Customer support

Some companies are starting to leverage social media as a form of enhanced customer support। The reason is that it enables brands to have a dialogue with their customers in a new way. I saw a presentation recently about how a company used X to communicate with its customers in conjunction with their Super Bowl ad. Other companies are using similar platforms to field support questions, similar to an 800 number or web chat. This works to a degree, but when you consider the volume of inquiries coming through, say, on X, along with incoming emails and phone calls, it hardly seems like a relevant channel at this point.

Community marketing

Many companies now have their own Facebook group that customers can join. This method of community marketing shows great potential, assuming customers can find the right page, as mentioned above. The additional challenge here is that companies largely have not figured out how to use this to their advantage.

Protecting your brand

One of the things that social media does for big brands is to magnify consumer opinions, both positive and negative। This can be scary for brand owners who have grown accustomed to controlling their brand image and messaging.

The notion that one dissatisfied customer can post a bad review on Yelp and tarnish the brand’s online image has some marketers and business owners sweating in the cold late at night. Relax. Fight fire with fire.

The best thing a brand owner can do is leverage their community and ask them to write reviews using the same channels. The winery above did a great job of this, posting a link on their Facebook page and inviting members to go to Yelp and write reviews.

Let’s be careful out there.

One thing businesses should be aware of is that social media can be a double-edged sword. I was talking to a friend on the train today who revealed how he used Twitter as a competitive intelligence and sales tool. He was monitoring tweets from and about his competitors and could tell who they were selling to.
Also see: AI-generated content for SEO is a Double-Edged Sword

From that point, a well-placed sales call is all it takes to get a meeting with the right person to close a deal. Big brands don’t need to fear this particular tactic as much. Still, the lesson remains: assume that whatever you post on social media will be read by everyone, and use this as a filter when crafting your social media.

What’s ahead?

Despite the staggering numbers associated with the rise of social media, I don’t think we quite know what to do with it yet। Sure, we like it when celebrities tweet. Still, I think we will all agree that we don’t care if my cousin Vinny just ate a delicious steak. We may be interested in Facebook updates from some of our friends, but the sheer volume of posts makes it almost impossible to find anything useful or interesting.

Post excerpts from David Roth, who is Director of Search Engine Marketing for Yahoo!, Inc.